Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated by Anamaria Crowe Serrano. BEYOND THE SEA brings together two book-length sequences first published in Mexico in the early years of the century, both taking their origins from Greece, a matter of central importance for the poet for many years. Fittingly, for subject-matter thoroughly drenched in the Greek past, the poems are odes and dithyrambs; the gods are there, imagery that has echoed across the centuries is here transposed into a limpid modern Mexican poetry, composed with the lightest of touches. Here the Mayans of Bonampak meet the Minoans of...

In these poems, words are a scalpel that probes the shifting sands of meaning. Themes of identity, communication, love, loss and isolation are peeled pack to reveal, with devastating precision, both the deficiencies and the power of language: words that can heal or save; words that paralyse and attack.